Yes/
You once told, me after a class at Cornell that you'd been unable to read more than one hundred or so pages O’Finnegans Wake. As it happens, on page 104 there begins a section very close in spirit to Pale Fire, and I wonder if you've ever read this, or seen the similarity. It is the history of all the editions and interpretations of Anna Livia Plurabelle's Letter (or «Mamafesta», text included). Among the three pages listing the various titles of ALP's letter, Joyce includes Try our Taal on a Taub (which we are already doing), and I wondered if you would comment on Swift's contribution to the literature about the corruption of learning and literature. Is it only a coincidence that Kinbote's «Forword» to Pale Fire is dated «Oct. 19», which is the date of Swift's death?
I finished Finnegans Wake eventually. It has no inner connection with Pale Fire. I think it is so nice that the day on which Kinbote committed suicide (and he certainly did after putting the last touches to his edition of the poem) happens to be both the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum and that of «poor old man Swift» 's death, which is news to me (but see variant in note to line 231). In common with Pushkin, I am fascinated by fatidic dates. Moreover, when dating some special event in my novels I often choose a more or less familiar one as a point de repere (which helps to check a possible misprint in the proofs), as for instance «April 1» in the diary of Hermann in Despair.
Mention of Swift moves me to ask about the genre The Pale Fire; as a «monstrous semblance of a novel», do you see it in terms of some tradition or form?
The form of Pale Fire is specifically, if not generically, new. 1 would like to take this pleasant opportunity to correct the following misprints in the Putnam edition, 1962, second impression: On page 137, end of note to line 143, «rustic» should be «rusty». On page 151, «Catskin Week» should be «Catkin Week». On page 223, the line number in the reference at the end of the first note should be not «550» but «549». On page 237, top, «For» should be «for». On page 241, the word «lines» after «disentprise» should be «rhymes». And on page 294, the comma after «Arnold» should be replaced by an open parenthesis. Thank you.2 (Since Mr. Nahokov has opened an F.rrata Department, the following misprints from the Lancer Books paperback edition of Pale Fire, 1963, should be noted: on page 17, fifth line from bottom of middle paragraph, «sad» should be «saw». On page 60, note to lines 4748, line 21 should be «burst an appendix», not «and». On page 111, fourth line of note to line 172, «inscription» is misspelled. On page 158, last sentence of note to line 493, «filfth» should be «filth». Nabokov's other books are relatively free from misprints, except for the Popular Library paperback edition of The Gift, 1963, whose blemishes are too numerous to mention.)
Do you make a clear distinction between satire and parody? I ask this because you have so often said you do not wish to be taken as a «moral satirist», and yet parody is so central to your vision.
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Chapter Ten in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight contains a wonderful description of how parody functions in your own novels. But your sense of what “parody” means seems to stretch the usual definition, as when Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading tells his mother, «You're still only a parody . . . Just like this spider, just like those bars, just like the striking of that clock. « All art, then, or at least all attempts at a «realistic» art, would seem to produce a distortion, a «parody». Would you expand on what you mean by «parody» and why, as Fyodor says in The Gift, «The spirit of parody always goes along with genuine poetry»?
When the poet Cincinnatus C, in my dreamiest and most poetical novel, accuses (not quite fairly) his mother of being a parody, he uses the word in its familiar sense of «grotesque imitation». When Fyodor, in The Gift, alludes to that «spirit of parody» which plays iridescently around the spray of genuine «serious» poetry, he is referring to parody in the sense of an essentially lighthearted, delicate, mockingbird game, such as Pushkin's parody of Derzhavin in Exegi Monumentum.
What is your opinion of Joyces parodies? Do you see any difference in the artistic effect of scenes such as the maternity hospital and the beach interlude with Gerty Macdowell? Are you familiar with the work of younger American writers who have been influenced by both you and Joyce, such as Thomas Pynchon (a Comellian, Class of '59, who surely was in Literature 312), and do you have any opinion on the current ascendancy of the so-called parodynovel (John Earth, for instance)?
The literary parodies in the Maternal Hospital chapter are on the whole jejunish. Joyce seems to have been hampered by the general sterilized tone he chose for that chapter, and this somehow dulled and monotonized the inlaid skits. On the other hand, the frilly novelette parodies in the Masturbation scene are highly successful; and the sudden junction of its cliches with the fireworks and tender sky of real poetry is a feat of genius. I am not familiar with the works of the two other writers you mention.3 (3 Mrs. Nabokov, who graded her husband's examination papers, did remember Pynchon, but only for his «unusual» handwriting: half printing, half script.)
Why, in Pale Fire, do you call parody the «last resort of wit»?
It is Kinbote speaking. There are people whom parody upsets.
Are the composition of Lolita and Speak, Memory, two very different books about the spell exerted by the past, at all connected in the way that the translations of The Song of Igor's Campaign and Eugene Onegin are related to Pale Fire? Had you finished all the notes to Onegin before you began Pale Fire?
Yes, I had finished all my notes to Onegin before I began Pale Fire. Flaubert speaks in one of his letters, in relation to a certain scene in Madame Bovary, about the difficulty of painting couleur sur couleur. This in a way is what I tried to do in retwisting my own experience when inventing Kinbote. Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.
Although selfparody seems to be a vital part of your work, you are a writer who believes passionately in the primacy of the imagination. Yet your novels are filled with little details that seem to have been purposely pulled from your own life, as a reading of Speak, Memory makes clear, not to mention the overriding patterns, such as the lepidopteral motif, which extend through so many of your books. They seem to partake of something other than the involuted voice, to suggest some clearly held idea about the interrelationship between selfknowledge and artistic creation, self-parody and identity. Would you comment on this, and the significance of autobiographical hints in works of art that are literally not a utobiographical?
I would say that imagination is a form of memory. Down, Plato, down, good dog. An image depends on the power of association, and association is supplied and prompted by memory. When we speak of a vivid individual recollection we are paying a compliment not to our capacity of retention but to Mnemosyne's mysterious foresight in having stored up this or that element which creative imagination may want to use when combining it with later recollections and inventions. In this sense, both memory and imagination are a negation of time.
C. F. Snow has complained about the gulf between the «two cultures», the literary and scientific communities. As someone who has bridged this gulf, do you see the sciences and humanities as necessarily opposed? Have your experiences as a scientist influenced your performance as an artist? Is it fanciful to use the vocabulary of physics in describing the structures of some of your novels?